Cosmos — - Carl Sagan

She opened Cosmos to the first page and began reading again. This time, not as a granddaughter mourning, but as a student taking a very old, very beautiful exam.

She took a deep breath. The air was mostly nitrogen from ancient volcanoes, oxygen from the breath of prehistoric algae, and argon left over from the birth of the Milky Way. She exhaled. Cosmos - Carl Sagan

And then she thought of the final pages of Cosmos , where Sagan wrote about the Voyager spacecraft—how it would sail through the silent dark for billions of years, carrying a golden record with greetings in fifty-five languages, the sound of a mother kissing her child, and music from a planet that had only just learned to look up. She opened Cosmos to the first page and began reading again

Somewhere, across the galaxy, photons that had touched her grandfather’s face were still traveling outward at the speed of light. They would never stop. Neither would the carbon from his smile, the calcium from his hands. The air was mostly nitrogen from ancient volcanoes,

Ariadne smiled. “Ready, Grandpa,” she whispered.

But Ariadne went for the books.